Bret Weinstein

The Great Taking is a very good, very scary short book.

David Webb is the author.

And what he describes is a trap that we in the public have been subjected to that we don't know is there yet because it hasn't been tripped.

And what he argues is that

there are a great many assets that we think we hold, that we believe we understand our relationship to, that are actually poised to be taken from us in a financial collapse.

So for example,

But stocks used to be held in paper form.

You had stock certificates in your safe, right?

And so the laws that govern physical ownership governed them by virtue of the fact that this piece of paper was your indication of ownership.

The way we own stocks has now changed.

So if you have stocks, you don't have a stock certificate.

Your stocks are held in sort of the same way that your cryptocurrency is held if it's in an exchange.

Where you don't really have cryptocurrency, what you have is an IOU from a company that has cryptocurrency.

And as long as the company remains solvent, then it's the same.

You can use it, you can take it out, you can put it in.

But the problem is that these stock certificates that we no longer have have been replaced by an agreement that has contingency clauses.

Those contingency clauses mean that your stock can be used as collateral by the holder.

and if they need to satisfy a debt because of insolvency, that your stock becomes the way to satisfy the debt.

So in other words, there's a hidden mechanism whereby you could suddenly discover that somebody else has used your stock and not paid you in order to settle a debt of theirs, right?

It's not a big deal as long as the market remains stable because